Roger Sperry, the maverick brain scientist who was haunted by psyche.

Roger Sperry was a maverick neuroscientist who arrived at definitive ideas about brain function by departing from the views of his peers. He solved the riddle of the corpus callosum and won a Nobel prize for identifying the different cognitive abilities of the disconnected right and left hemispheres. He could have won another Nobel for his work on prenatal formation of behavioral neuronal networks. Later in life, he fought an inconclusive battle to demonstrate that mental and spiritual factors can direct brain activity without violating orthodox neurophysiology. The paper discusses nodal points in his career and sources of inspiration within twentieth-century neuroscience.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This paper describes the scientific figure of Roger Sperry as a maverick researcher, an original thinker who arrived at definitive notions about the working of the brain mostly by distancing himself from the prevalent views of his peers. After solving the riddle of the functions of the corpus callosum, he won a Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for identifying the different cognitive abilities of the disconnected right and left hemispheres of the human brain. He could have won another Nobel prize for his work on the prenatal formation of behavioral neuronal networks and their growth and development after birth. In the last part of his life, he fought a courageous but inconclusive battle for demonstrating that mental and spiritual factors can direct brain activity and behavior without violating the laws of orthodox neurophysiology. Some nodal points in his scientific career and some sources of inspirations for his thinking are identified and discussed within the historical background of the neurosciences of the twentieth century.